Chloe Hubbard

I lead the UK editorial team at the Independent; responsible for everything from strategy and budget, to the day to day editorial coverage across all departments. I also lead the our in-house AI innovation team and launched the Bulletin website in 2025 - this has been a real success story for our site, currently creating circa 30m monthly article views from content assisted with AI.

Under my leadership Independent.co.uk has seen consistent traffic growth YoY with an average monthly readership in the UK of 22million people. We compete and beat newsrooms with significantly higher headcount in terms of audience size, and operate a highly profitable and efficient model.

I run the UK editorial operation at the Independent, leading on everything from daily news decisions to company-wide audience strategy and content planning.

I am ultimately responsible for ensuring the Independent achieves targets primarily in terms of website traffic, but also video page views, brand awareness and paid-for content.

Day to day I lead conferences, manage the UK editorial team and deputise for the global editor-in-chief.

My responsibilities can be as granular as editing individual stories, to planning coverage and owning the budget and strategy for major events such as the UK and US elections and the Olympic Games.

Reporting directly to the Managing Director, I owned several key strands of editorial from both a publishing and business perspective including Indy100, Independent Espanol, Independent TV and the Asia Edition. I was also responsible for overall digital best practice business-wide and adoption of new workflows across the global business. This involved everything from training people to work in different ways, to introducing new software to benefit the publication and ensuring teams use it to full potential.

As launch publisher of the Espanol site I created and implemented the entire audience and staffing strategy, bringing in 70m page views in its first year.

I was headhunted to drive traffic to Stuff.co.nz - New Zealand's top news website. The company's aim was to become the top-read news site in Auckland, ahead of the New Zealand Herald - the trusted, legacy masthead in the country. This was something the company had never achieved. The projected timeline for the project was 18 months - under my leadership we completed it in five. This was achieved by a complete overhaul of the processes in the Auckland newsroom. The team were fragmented and underperforming and there was no clear strategy in place.

Managed various departments including; audience, social, sport, culture, homepage, video, news, Indy100, and the e-edition. Editorial lead on the building of the new CMS to support the launch of Independent Minds. Changed audience strategy in the wake of the Facebook algorithm switch in 2017 to gain new audience via search and off-platform. Implemented a thorough planning process for editorial.

Working as part of the website's leadership team to manage the team and drive audience to the Telegraph's website.

Managing the entire online and print running of a four edition weekly regional newspaper, with a readership 87,500 in print and 200,000 unique online visitors a month.

6 month fixed term contract at the BBC to try broadcast journalism - I quickly realised I am more comfortable behind the camera, not in front of it.